In the Viewing Room, Filipino-American artist Keka Enriquez makes her highly anticipated return to the art world in Keka Enriquez: Odds and Ends, an exhibition unveiling four new works after the artist’s 20-year hiatus from painting. Renowned for her evocative paintings and installations exploring the psychological and social facets of home, identity, memory, and displacement, Enriquez first gained recognition under the preeminent Filipino artist Roberto Chabet's mentorship. As a Filipino diasporic artist, she portrays Western interiors, critiquing mass media’s normative ideals. Appropriating a Neo-Expressionist style, Enriquez disrupts institutionalized conventions of gender, race, and citizenship, embracing a transcultural subjectivity to reveal alternative perspectives within
her paintings.

Regarded in the Philippines as one of the foremost artists of her generation in the 1990s, Enriquez exhibited in the The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and received the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Awards. In 1998, Enriquez relocated to San Francisco and departed from the art world completely. After almost a quarter century, Enriquez's return to art signals a new chapter in her artistic journey. Odds and Ends showcases her evolved style, which remains tactile, sensuous, bold, yet is marked by a newfound sense of looseness and freedom.

Keka Enriquez's exhibition coincides with Silverlens' solo presentation of Modernist Leo Valledor at Frieze New York. Valledor, born and predominantly working within the San Francisco Bay Area, is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential Filipino American artists in US history. This convergence, taking place during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, offers a unique opportunity to explore the dynamic interplay of Filipino diaspora artists, emphasizing the profound legacy of Asian American artistic expression in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Keka Enriquez (b. 1962, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in San Francisco, California) is a distinguished contemporary artist celebrated for her experimental and expressionistic paintings. Influenced by the Neo-expressionist movement, Enriquez's work is characterized by textured brushstrokes, bold colors, and innovative form. Renowned for her exploration of domestic interiors, traditionally the domain of women, Enriquez subverts the masculine art movement to delve into the psychological and social dimensions of home. Through her manipulation of pigment, texture, and surface, she retrieves and reshapes the multi-layered experience of the homescape while contemplating the significance of painting as a whole. After twenty-five years of working within her San Francisco community, Enriquez returned to the art world in 2023. A showcase in 2024 will unveil a series of new oil on canvas paintings highlighting the evolution of her practice.

Enriquez embarked on her artistic journey in the 1980s under the mentorship of Roberto Chabet, widely acclaimed as the father of conceptual art in the Philippines. The artist graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of the Philippines. She has exhibited her work in the Philippines, the
United States, England, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. In 1994, she was a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award. Under a grant from UNESCO, she obtained her Masters degree in Fine Arts at the Norwich School of Art and Design, England in 1995.